Mod maker thinks he's the police


  • FoxDev

    It also adds "a licence that requires a simple SteamAPI validity check," as mod author Kaldaien writes on NeoGAF. "Nothing malicious happens if you fail this check, you're just presented with an infinite license screen that you can click Accept on but since you don't respect licenses the license doesn't respect your click."



  • @RaceProUK And? He open-sourced the mod. If anyone is bothered by this, they can compile the stuff themselves.


  • BINNED

    @RaceProUK said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:

    It also adds "a licence that requires a simple SteamAPI validity check,"

    Does it work in offline mode though? I assume not. Meaning, this is now effectively an always online DRM-like measure. That I don't approve of, regardless of any other arguments.


  • Winner of the 2016 Presidential Election

    @Onyx But it's an always online DRM imposed by modders. So it's hard to point fingers at them and say "bad modders, you improved the game for a sizable amount of people but not everybody"
    I am more okay with that, than companies pushing DRM!

    Filed under: You view might vary, obviously


  • FoxDev

    @Onyx said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:

    Does it work in offline mode though?

    fully offline, i don't believe so, however unless the mod is constantly re-checking the API it should just have the effect that you need to be online to start the app and after the check occurs you can drop offline without ill effect.

    also, why is everyone butthurt at the modder?

    it's an optional mod, that doesn't work for people who pirated the game.... people who got the game legit are unaffected by the restriction, and sure the modder didn't handle the situation gracefully but still...... the check only locks out people who didn't pay for what is a fucking awesome game that everyone should buy with actual money because PlatinumGames needs to make more games like this one.


  • BINNED

    @Kuro said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:

    But it's an always online DRM

    EOD

    Really, fuck that shit. Anyone remember Assassin's Creed... Bloodlines, was it? It worked poorly on stable connections, if you were on any kind of semi-dodgy WiFi (or bad ADSL, like some were) it would hitch and dip to unplayable levels of lag all the time. Also I'll have to apply a crack to it eventually because the servers will inevitably shut down one day, and then I won't be able to play.

    Ok, yes, it's a mod in this case, but ANY use/reinforcement of this shit is a Bad Thing™ IMHO. I intend to shit on the practice no matter who engages in it. I practice zero-tolerance policy in this case because I don't want to validate a single excuse for this shit.


  • FoxDev

    @accalia said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:

    also, why is everyone butthurt at the modder?

    Because the modder is forcing his moral standards onto others.

    @accalia said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:

    people who got the game legit are unaffected by the restriction

    Some get the game legit, then crack it to ensure Steam et al stay out of the way*. Unfortunately, this mod will detect that, and lock them out.

    *I don't do this, btw, but I know people who do, mainly to deal with the fact their Internet connection is less than reliable.



  • @Onyx I found the first game did that, so I just disconnected from wifi and had a much better experience for it.


  • FoxDev

    To clarify: I'm neutral on this matter myself. I don't agree with what he's done, but that's about it: I have no interest in pursuing the argument further than that.


  • FoxDev

    @RaceProUK said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:

    Because the modder is forcing his moral standards onto others.

    i'm sorry, but what?

    I'll freely admit my own record is not spotless, but as far as I'm concerned anyone who has the opportunity to acquire something they desire through a legal method that provides income to the creator of that item and then fails to do that, instead acquiring that item through acts of piracy has no leg to stand on when they complain that a free, open source mod to that game has a DRM restriction that requires them to have purcahsed the game they are modding.

    If they want the mod that goddess damned much they can fork the mod and remove the check, or find someone else who has.

    And those who have purchased the game legally or have not acquired the game at all are COMPLAINING that a mod creator wants to make sure that the developer of the game gets their fair cut from players who use there mod? :wtf:

    no, sorry, that's not a strong enough reaction.

    Because again:

    1. The mod is optional. you don't need it to play the game
    2. the Mod creator implemented a simple and effective DRM that checks that you own the game before allowing you to use it.
    3. As far as i can tell this is not always-online DRM, merely online-to-start DRM
    4. The mod creator gets none of your money
    5. It's open source so you can build the mod yourself without that check if you want to, or get a copy of the mod from someone else who already did that.

    so i ask again: Why are people butthurt at this modder instead of praising their intentions?

    @RaceProUK said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:

    Some get the game legit, then crack it to ensure Steam et al stay out of the way*. Unfortunately, this mod will detect that, and lock them out.

    I see no indication that this requires always-online DRM My understanding is that it is a one time check so as long as they pass the initial check they're good. and if they cracked the game for other reasons there's still the option of the cracked mod, or simply not using it.

    I fail to see how that would be a reason for anyone to engage in "Teh Butthurt"


  • FoxDev

    @accalia I'm just offering a likely explanation.

    Plus, you already know I prefer to buy games legit, and indeed, bought Nier: Automata legit.


    I think part of the problem is a lot of the louder complainers are the type that's militant against DRM, and see any attempt to spread or enforce such technologies as a hostile act. Inevitably, they clash with the people who have drunk the DRM Kool-Aid and flatly refuse to recognise the problems with the tech, and the war escalates. Personally, I'm sat in the middle, not really bothering myself too much with which side is 'right' (after all, they both make good points). I see the usefulness in DRM, but I also see the issues it can cause. Equally, I'm a happy Steam user, but I also acknowledge the platform's faults (of which there are many).

    I just don't want to be caught with my pants down when it all inevitably gets ugly.



  • @RaceProUK said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:

    Because the modder is forcing his moral standards onto others.

    Nobody is forcing anything on anyone.


  • FoxDev

    @gwowen Again,

    @RaceProUK said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:

    I'm just offering a likely explanation.


  • BINNED

    @RaceProUK said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:

    I think part of the problem is a lot of the louder complainers are the type that's militant against DRM, and see any attempt to spread or enforce such technologies as a hostile act.

    To clarify my own position: I'm not happy about DRM but I accept that it's a reality in the industry and am willing to accept it, except when it's a piece of shit that punishes legitimate customers because of poor connection, having more than one optical drive, potentially damaging their hardware etc. And we've seen all of these (though I'm not sure if "wrecking the HDD" claims were ever completely substantiated).

    If this is not an always-online thing I'm willing to give it a pass. If it is, I don't care who implemented it and if it can or cannot be removed by poking around the source code, I abhor the practice itself because it fucks over consumers, if not now, then potentially in the future if something happens to the serverside component (shutdown, breaking API change, or similar).


  • FoxDev

    @RaceProUK said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:

    @accalia I'm just offering a likely explanation.

    intent understood, how that could be a legitimate reason (on their part not yours) is not.

    @RaceProUK said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:

    militant against DRM

    you know...... DRM is a symptom, not the problem. There once was a day when we had little to no DRM other than physical DRM. You know the only thing stopping people from pirating NES/SNES games? making the cartidges. that was it. you manage to make the cartidge with the game data on it you copied it.

    In fact that was a thing that happened, but Nintendo did nothing about it because it was still physical stuff and that was really hard to move about so the effective cost of the piracy to the end consumer was about as much as it was to buy the real thing. the CD-ROM based consoles had a bit more of a trouble with piracy, as CDRs were becoming a thing at the time and computers could read them. Al;so the internet was becoming a thing. Sure it might take a couple of days to download the game, but that wasn't so long to wait. So piracy skyrocketed and in response DRM was added to prevent copying. and this the war between the game creators and the pirates began.

    And you know what, neither side has played nice. Sony put DRM into their music CDs that installed a rootkit in your computer, crackers have multiple times included malware in their cracks, either deliberately in the case of scumbag crackers, or unintentionally, as in the case of scumbag warez site operators. And of course the war has only been escalating.

    to actually stop DRM being used, you know what you need to do? You need to remove the financial incentive to crack games. If you do that then the piracy rates should start disappearing, then yoou can direct your efforts at publishers and sell them on the idea of

    1. If you sell your game for 30$ instead of $60 you'll sell like three times as many games, but you'll pay basically the same cost because you don't have to produce physical media so you'll get 1.5 times the profit, more money! yay!
    2. if you do that your piracy rates will go way down because all those people who couldn't afford 60$ might just spring for 30$
    3. That also means that your piracy rates might drop so low you can sell the gamed for 20$ and get like six times as many people buying your game, which is twice the profit you would have gotten at the 60$ price point!
    4. with piracy rates that low you can remove DRM entirely and the money you used to spend on DRM is now profit! YAY!

    then...... then the world will be a better place and you will actually accomplish your goal! And bonus i get to hear less flaming rows between you and that other side who thing DRM is the goddesses own jizm.... whatever that means.



  • @RaceProUK said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:

    Because the modder is forcing his moral standards onto others.

    So don't hit the fucking install button next to it?

    It's really hard to get upset about this, both as a player of games and as a maker of mods.

    And BTW you would not believe how many bug reports makers of popular mods get from pirates, bugs that only exists because they're running some janky broken hacked version of the game.

    @RaceProUK said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:

    Some get the game legit, then crack it to ensure Steam et al stay out of the way*. Unfortunately, this mod will detect that, and lock them out.

    Good! Those people can go fuck themselves.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @thegoryone said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:

    it's not really "online-to-start" but as far as I've read should work fine when steam is in offline mode, too.

    But “online-to-get-steam-into-offline-mode-but-then-it-all-works-fine” is a bit of a mouthful.



  • @accalia said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:

    There once was a day when we had little to no DRM other than physical DRM. You know the only thing stopping people from pirating NES/SNES games?

    NES/SNES had a lock-out chip that was DRM. Without the right (Nintendo-provided, or Tengen-reverse engineered) bootstrap response the NES would reject the game and do that blinky power light thing.

    A lot of C-64-era games had some form of copy protection as well. It's really as old as the industry in general. (With Dreamcast games being a huge outlier.) The Atari 2600 didn't, but it was so primitive it barely had memory.

    (Although I guess it wouldn't be called "digital" rights management, as early systems relied on a packed-in feelie to provide the codes, or exploiting flaws in a particular system's disk drive.) (Or in the C-64s case, taking advantage of the awesome fact that its disk drive was a whole 'nother computer and could be programmed to do some weird-ass shit.)

    @accalia said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:

    In fact that was a thing that happened, but Nintendo did nothing about it

    Nintendo quite famously did a lot about it. They sued Tengen for copyright infringement. (Interesting read if you have the time. Basically the court agreed with Tengen as part of the whole Compaq "clean-room reverse engineering is hunky-dorey" thing until they found out Tengen had obtained Nintendo's copyright filings on their lockout chip on false pretenses.)

    Anyway, I had to correct the bad history in your post.


  • FoxDev

    @blakeyrat Man i missed your pedantry.

    corrections accepted.

    I think my point still stands that those were better times where end users weren't accidentally punished for the escalating DRM war between content creators and content pirates and that we can actually return to those days still stands though.



  • @Onyx Someone i.e. me wanted to play Prey Early and I decided to try tricking it by resetting my clock and starting Steam offline. You cannot play a game offline with Steam until it has been launched once online with that machine.



  • @accalia said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:

    Man i missed your pedantry.

    That's not pedantry, that's you spreading bad information. NES/SNES did have DRM. Nintendo did a lot when they found companies trying to defeat it to make unauthorized games. The Tengen lawsuit wasn't settled until 1994. Nintendo didn't even give up on it even after the NES had ceased to be revenue-generating.

    Those are facts. It's not you being vague and me being a pedant, it's you saying things that are false and me pointing it out.



  • @blakeyrat said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:

    NES/SNES had a lock-out chip that was DRM. Without the right (Nintendo-provided, or Tengen-reverse engineered) bootstrap response the NES would reject the game and do that blinky power light thing.

    EA managed to hack I believe NES copy protection because and produce their own carts.



  • @lucas1 said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:

    EA managed to hack I believe NES copy protection because and produce their own carts.

    Tengen wasn't the ONLY company to do this, just the FIRST.

    (Remember Cheetahmen? Yeah, Action 52 was an unauthorized cart..)


  • BINNED


  • FoxDev

    @Onyx Super 3D... um... what does that say?




  • ♿ (Parody)

    @accalia said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:

    so i ask again: Why are people butthurt at this modder instead of praising their intentions?

    How can I praise someone writing code for games when we haven't cured cancer‽ 🐠


  • FoxDev

    @boomzilla said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:

    @accalia said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:

    so i ask again: Why are people butthurt at this modder instead of praising their intentions?

    How can I praise someone writing code for games when we haven't cured cancer‽ 🐠

    E_GARAGE_IS_ARROWS



  • @thegoryone Where can I get this particular banana mod and is there DRM?


  • BINNED

    @thegoryone said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:

    @hungrier No DRM but rumours are the platform will be dead in 10 years

    What, PC? Again?

    I should use that as excuse instead of saying my grandma died for the 17th time...


  • I survived the hour long Uno hand

    @thegoryone said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:

    We do have chocolate bananas though

    This morning I had a slice of banana split pie someone brought in for the office Pie Day.


  • FoxDev

    @Yamikuronue said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:

    Pie Day

    But it's not March 14th 😕

    ...

    Eh, who cares? PIE! 😋




  • ♿ (Parody)

    I can understand the ideological opposition of @Onyx, even if I don't agree with it (or to the same degree, anyways). He's like the RMS of DRM, but presumably with more sanitary eating habits.


  • BINNED

    @boomzilla I'd like to think I'm nowhere near RMS level.

    I don't like DRM in general from preservationist side of things: unless copied and cracked old software will at some point become impossible to run (floppy disks are pretty much fucked by this point, them still working in some cases is a small miracle, we can be pretty sure the optical media will face the same faith etc.).

    As a thing that is there to prevent copying stuff right now, eh, okay, I'll live with it. It'll get broken, eventually. As long as there are working copies in 20 years when publishers (mostly) stop caring anyway, we'll figure it out.

    The shit that's outright hostile to me when I try to use it in a legitimate way is a different category all together.


  • I survived the hour long Uno hand

    @RaceProUK I believe March's Pi Day was so popular they decided to have pie on a semi-regular basis.

    Two days ago someone sent an email saying "I'm bringing pie on friday, who's with me?" and now we have like 12 pies.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @Onyx said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:

    I'd like to think I'm nowhere near RMS level.

    I think that for this particular issue, you kind of are. OK, probably no one is as pure / as much of a fanatic, but your arguments really remind me of his. In a good way.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Yamikuronue said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:

    the office Pie Day

    Hmm, Fridays are Gyoza Days here. :)


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @thegoryone said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:

    they look amazing

    Taste pretty good too. Nothing wrong with small savoury bites. ;)


  • FoxDev

    @dkf Far Eastern cuisine in general is fascinating


  • I survived the hour long Uno hand

    @Yamikuronue I'm being told this is incorrect. Instead, this has to do with Developer D owing Developer W a burrito, being harassed about it for months, and finally cracking and bringing in pie... a month ago. This is the follow-up anyway.



  • @accalia said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:

    I think my point still stands that those were better times where end users weren't accidentally punished for the escalating DRM war between content creators and content pirates and that we can actually return to those days still stands though.

    Not sure those days ever existed. Games in the 80s already came with DRM checks in the form of password questions you needed the manual in hand to answer ("what is the third word on page 56 of the manual?"). The idea being, a pirate might copy a game and distribute the disks, but copying the manuals would be more difficult. Also, back then games came with manuals. But if a legitimate customer lost the manual they were locked out of the game.



  • @Kian PC games were notorious for having those, in addition to non-manual versions like the AD&D Gold Box code wheels and Maniac Mansion's door code (original version is printed with diagonal red lines across the pages; Thimbleweed Park's Red Gel Decoder is a reference to this).


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @Kian said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:

    @accalia said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:

    I think my point still stands that those were better times where end users weren't accidentally punished for the escalating DRM war between content creators and content pirates and that we can actually return to those days still stands though.

    Not sure those days ever existed. Games in the 80s already came with DRM checks in the form of password questions you needed the manual in hand to answer ("what is the third word on page 56 of the manual?"). The idea being, a pirate might copy a game and distribute the disks, but copying the manuals would be more difficult. Also, back then games came with manuals. But if a legitimate customer lost the manual they were locked out of the game.

    Chuck Yeager's Flight Simulator (Two disks IIRC) did that. That was fun, because the instruction booklet wasn't ever used otherwise...


  • Banned

    I can't help to point out that everyone missed TRWTF here. The mod's author says that pirates don't respect the license, while technically pirates have no license to respect. License is a right to use software given by owner. The owner never gave the pirates any right to use the software.



  • @Gąska said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:

    I can't help to point out that everyone missed TRWTF here. The mod's author says that pirates don't respect the license, while technically pirates have no license to respect. License is a right to use software given by owner. The owner never gave the pirates any right to use the software.

    The game itself has a license, which the pirates have chosen not to respect. That's not the same as the pirates having no license to respect.



  • Does anyone remember the Lenslok?


  • Fake News

    @accalia said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:

    I think my point still stands that those were better times where end users weren't accidentally punished for the escalating DRM war between content creators and content pirates and that we can actually return to those days still stands though.

    I never personally owned a NES but from all the "war stories" people and friends tell about taking out the cartridge and blowing on them I believe that DRM was already a problem back then.

    Ok, some of the pins might not properly make contact with the cartridge but why would it otherwise outright fail to boot?


  • Impossible Mission - B

    @RaceProUK said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:

    Because the modder is forcing his immoral standards onto others.

    FTFY. There is no excuse for this. DRM is hacking, and it needs to be legally recognized as such and banned outright.


  • Banned

    @powerlord said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:

    @Gąska said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:

    I can't help to point out that everyone missed TRWTF here. The mod's author says that pirates don't respect the license, while technically pirates have no license to respect. License is a right to use software given by owner. The owner never gave the pirates any right to use the software.

    The game itself has a license, which the pirates have chosen not to respect. That's not the same as the pirates having no license to respect.

    If someone steals a car, did they break sales agreement?


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